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This is the life I have chosen,
And you won't hear me whine about it.

Yelling, sleepless, sunbeam smiles,
It's all of a one, and fuller and better than I deserve.

Sometimes it is a cage, but isn't all love a cage of sorts?
Heavy bars of responsibility.
This life is the whip that trains me into my best self.

I could leave of course.  Nothing is actually stopping me.
I am free to walk away and be utterly destroyed
While
Doing
Anything
I
Want

My appetites king, queen, judge, jury, and even god.

With great relief and a thankful countenance
I tuck the key back under my shirt.

Ill humor

What lies heaviest is your guess

The cruel, dust, gloom weather outside

Or the ebony, weary heart

A beaten drum in a fog war

Lost

Busted drumsticks; goatskin left torn

Yet lying, beating in the ghost

Still crashes in the mist of haunt

To remain there lies true, heavy

Cost

I find myself a conjoined twin

With the humor, who leads the dance

Was chance in the music as we

Two step on the frightened rhythmic

Frost

Courage spins hope, still unaware

Exits left to be, lucid dreams

The music falls deaf, except mine

Found in the weather, I remain

Exhaust

in the village

the quaint and lasting effects
of a quiet that fell
on deaf and dying ears
like a lightning bug fainting from the dark
like shifting sands after an earthquake
a thousand miles from a soul
and i wonder at that;
how you take words and turn them
in your hands
like spaghetti
like confusion
like an overfilled belly
followed by predictability.

in the village they have a
word for you
in the city they know you but
use no name.
they've called you by
buddy and chum
but your face is
flat like a billboard
masked like a dollar bill
like a one act play
without the curtain
drawn.

the tiresome effects
of this quieted namelessness
disquiets me
like a stillborn gazelle
like a stale and unwanted pastry
left on the door step for
a starving girl
who cannot get out of bed.

Four Square

-->

1

I can feel my ring where it isn’t

I lay my eyes where I shouldn’t

I scoff as they do what I couldn’t

I dream and go where I can’t

2

And the snow wakes me

Squeezes me

Mocking all the notions of death as darkness

Death is the blinding white of endless snow

3

I will spoon out the heart of the air

Clawing wide the moment

I will bruise the second hand

Till it bends and bursts

4

Let me taste

Like a man who can not remember

One more time let me feel

The spike of citrus, her tongue, his laughs, a cold tear on a warm check.

Braunschweiger

Apparently homeless man,
sits in space between
the in and out door
at the place we all buy our food.

he is eating Braunschweiger with a spoon
beside him is a gallon of chocolate milk
somewhere between full and empty

"It's all down hill from there"
he says in a voice just loud enough,
he may not have meant me to hear it,
and he waves me on

Limerick #1

A blank page stares up

You don't have a clue, do you?
How can I respond?

Be careful, or not.

There are certain phrases that cross my lips so often, as

to make me pause and ask myself

is this my job?

Be careful.  Be quiet.  Be polite.  Be nice.  

Where is it written?  Tell me please.  Who has decreed that

this be my constant belligerent mantra?

Is it not just as much my imperative

to encourage risk

to teach the noisy shout

to cut with the sword that which needs cutting

Be careful, or not.  Take the risk if it is the right risk.

Learn what quiet is.  Let your shout come from the place of quiet, 

and let it be a mighty shout.

Politeness is often nothing but a disguise, and being nice is almost never enough.

Choose kindness and authenticity instead.  

These are the wise words I wish crossed my lips more often,

but I get so tired,

and the moment has passed.

dreaming in latin

some nights
you haunt my dreams
unblemished and golden
like all the things
you cannot become again
like all the days
we could not hold,
like all the nights
we could not share.
yet in beauty we
became,
ever the more,
never the less;
with stealth and force
and longing.

some nights
i lie awake
dreaming
in latin.

Are you really this close?

-->

Are you really this close?

In the dim

You brush my elbow with your breast

and I think of the beach

and sandy elbows

I built a statue of myself at the breakfast table

Mechanically shoveling bites

Checking phone for signs of life

Your sweater wasn’t’ enough

as you mixed eggs and milk

Winter creeped up your stomach

Like a perve neighbor

who catches you unaware but doesn’t blush

with two granite eyes

I stared into that little box

Scrolling for salvation

As your hair brushed my cheek

And I thought of lines

Painted on the soccer pitch

And the smell of vinyl in grass

I noticed 

that you asked

If I noticed

and I said I had

But you didn’t believe me

And I tried to stare into your eyes

Tried to be so aware

Tried to push a memory

Of me noticing

Into your mind, 

but you wouldn’t have it

Instead you ate your eggs and wondered

Are you really this close?

Untitled

Here is a series of questions you may ask yourself. I give you permission.

What is play?  Why am I not playing?

How are you?  Why do I care so little?

How much time?  How better to fill it?  How not to fill it with drivel?

Where did that feeling, idea, notion, unction, lubrication, go to?  How do I get it back?

Who is?  Who isn't?

Are you really this close?  Why do I rarely notice?

of sickness and health and middling

i am living in
short bursts
of edge-less entertainments
like a cloud casting her weight
ground-ward
without choice her lots
cast by matter's chances;
both a pure and confusing
calculus

i am sick in
long drawn periods
such as week's end
that found me
couch-ward like
a potato resting
in the cool ground
waiting for the the rain
and a fast and
purposed pull from
iron tines

and as i sick and health
the days asunder;
i am middling with
the least of these.
as a monk
out of cloister,
as a nun without
habit,
to be sans a right nor a left

I break for cars.

These automobile dreams

Have broken my legs in their

Lifeless aluminum and greasy

Glass shinning at me

Shinning me back at me

And I feel so small because

My reflection is redirected

I cannot read about myself in time magazine

I do not see me on the TV

I am two steps away from the fame

I am one step and out of the game

The puddles insult my shoes

As the radio sings the songs

I might have wrote if I’d had

My pen ready, the ink is wet

Against another blank masterpiece

And the man with the camera

Is waiting for the call

Blasphemy

I speak blasphemy so hot it sizzles
so sexy it curls your toes
I leave behind the old name
that Good Ol' time frame,
to follow the tree hanging
brown skinned baby boy

I jumps over fences and range wide
and the farther I go the clearer
the fog seems
There's a hound on my trail
with keens senses and such,
you know the rest, I won't steal too much.

You see there has been a lie on my tongue
but sometimes lies are truth too
what about you?
Are you a lie too?
I'll just follow the brown skinned tree hanging
baby boy.

mercenary soul

you believe fodder
and garbage
and deadpan.

you eat life upon
exit
as an actor
cloy and off
of stage.

you spit the bones
and shards
of tomorrow's scenes,
on venal thoughts
as a mallet
to the gong.

you drink sorrows
past those lips
like a player,
as a creature
nearest to
it's haunt.

you cast doubt
and dirt
of yesterday's disdain
over walls of conviction
as a cage born
child.

Oh, my mercenary soul!

i believe it still;
Redemption.

threadbare

i
wear
threads
of
patterned
ideation
and
childish
preposition;
warm
hand
stitches
handed
down
worn

I miss you in my belly button.

-->

You.

You!

You weakwilled sonovabitch!

I remember a few months ago

you licked my ear as I dozed in the backyard

Dosing my veins with your golden shots

promising me…

You promised me!

And I was blinded by you.

Now look.

You pale!

You pretend you don’t know me

After running your fingers through my hairs at the beach.

All my hairs!

Turning wet sand into a crispy crust.

Making me glow until everyone could see we’d been together.

Sure I’d blush.

Yeah, beet red, and everyone knew we’d been…

Rolling in that sand

Running in those waters

Laying out where everyone could see.

Those days, You were the only one who saw

how truly white my ass really was…

And now you hide, like said ass

in a shroud.

But the thing is

I can’t stop thinking about you.

I dreamt of you the other night

But I woke to the wicked darkness you’ve left me in.

Come back soon.

I miss you in my belly button.

Come back Sun.

wait i while

we walk an ancient paths,
being-under spruce and birch and air
and a conversations we cannot
hear

we sleep an ancient dreamings,
of glacier and iceberg and reflection
a substances beneath we will not
feel

we yearn for an ancient languages,
spoken in softly; as spice and song
and a Spirits that we did not
know

similies for lost boys

"like me," he said shrill,
as the shards of yesterday

baked into a pumpkin pie

leftover from Halloween Jack

seen in the dim light

you left behind with your

face-book-friends and Isabella.

i can't remember the

last time we were this lost,

like the being found 

on the curb

clenching brown bag

white knuckles telling tales
with blood for you and your two faces.

in a heartbeat all their own.

"like them," i replied dull,
as life in a suburban town
faked into minted coins

leftover from pity's politic
so as now to this day;
i cannot reply 

to lost boys.
I have confounded

the word for that love;

like a summer picnic,
in the plaid and rain.

like a weekend revival,
and a tent torn wind.

like a majestic bird of prey,
being struck by a truck at the crossroads.

Superman

-->

There’s a little girl with a superman cape that needs me

Her chocolate eyes melt into tears of disappointment

As I turn my back and open the door.

Her cries echo in my footsteps

In the creases of snow

and I hear her in the jingle of car keys

the creak of the door

and the hum of the engine

I see her eyes in the headlights

as I wind through banks mislaid automobiles and crippled intersections

I feel her lips tremble as my hands shiver off the cold

And I kiss her goodnight from miles away

With a dragon’s breath

Warming the world with my life

Pushing the winter back

Before sucking it in again.

inner beauty pageant

her?